Page:The Illustrated Key to the Tarot.djvu/23

Rh and his doctrine of occultism has changed the face of this card, and it now appears as a pseudo-Baphometic hgure with the head of a goat and a great torch between the horns; it is seated instead of erect, and in place of the generative organs there is the Hermetic caduceus. In Le Tarot Divinatoire of Papus the small demons are replaced by naked human beings, male and female, who are yoked only to each other. The author may be felicitated on this improved symbolism.
 * 1) The Tower struck by Lightning. Its alternative titles are: Castle of Plutus, God’s (Nature’s) House, and the Tower of Babel. In the last case, the figures falling therefrom are held to be Nimrod and his minister. It is assuredly a card of confusion, and the design corresponds, broadly speaking, to any of the designations except Maison Dieu, unless we are to understand that the House of God (Nature) has been abandoned and the veil of the temple rent. It is a little surprising that the device has not so far been allocated to the destruction of Solomon’s Temple, when the lightning would symbolize the fire and sword with which that edifice was visited by the King of the Chaldees.
 * 2) The Star, Dog-Star, or Sirius, also called fantastically the Star of the Magi. Grouped about it are seven minor luminaries, and beneath it is a naked female figure, with her left knee upon the earth and her right foot upon the water. She is in the act of pouring fluids from two vessels. A bird is perched on a tree near her; for this a butterfly on a rose has been substituted in some later cards. So also the Star has been called that of Hope. This is one of the cards which Court de Gebelin describes as wholly Egyptian—that is to say, in his own reverie.
 * 3) The Moon. Some eighteenth-century cards show the luminary on its waning side; in the debased edition of Etteilla, it is the moon at night in her plentitude, set in a heaven of stars; of recent years the moon is shown on the side of her increase. In nearly all presentations she is shining brightly and shedding the moisture of fertilizing dew in great drops. Beneath there are two towers, between which a path winds to the verge of the horizon. Two dogs, or alternatively a wolf and dog, are baying at the moon, and in the foreground there is water, through which a crayfish moves towards the land.
 * 4) The Sun. The luminary is distinguished in older cards by chief rays that are waved and salient alternately and by secondary salient rays. It appears to shed its influence on earth not only by light and heat, but—like the moon—by drops of dew. Court de Gebelin termed these tears of gold and of pearl just as he identified the lunar dew with the tears of Isis. Beneath the